I suffered major soul loss as a young boy in Australia. I died for the first time within this life, aged three, during a brutal winter in Tasmania, when I succumbed to pneumonia in both lungs and lost vital signs in the hospital. We didn’t talk about “near-death experiences” back then. I was told later that I “died and came back.” Over the next eight years, I had a very hard time staying in a body on this earth. I had pneumonia twelve times over this period. I seemed to be allergic to everything I breathed, and batteries of drugs and injections did no good. I lost vital signs again during an emergency appendectomy when I was nine, and in the minutes I was “out” of that body I seemed to live a whole life among a people who lived inside the earth. I was often desperately lonely and sad, coughing into my pillow at night in hopes my mother wouldn’t hear, spending half my time in the half-light of sickrooms, until at age eleven most of the symptoms evaporated.

I had no siblings, and no cousins or aunts and uncles came to call, and I had few friends I could keep as I was moved from school to school with my father’s army postings. One of the things that got me through was that I had a very special friend who could not be seen by others — a big, friendly man with a mane of white hair who was like the favorite uncle I never had. He assured me that, despite everything, I would make it through; he guaranteed it. He promised me that though I was lonely now and shy about girls, I would know the love of women. He told me that though it wasn’t safe for me now to talk about my dreams, the day would come when the whole world would be eager to hear them. I now know who that coach and cheerleader was: he was my older self (younger than I am now) reaching back across time to provide the mentorship that my wounded child self so desperately needed.

We can do this for our younger selves in their own time. At the very least, we can give them the assurance that however hard life seems, and however much pain they are in, they will survive. That is a cast-iron promise. We know they’ll make it through, because we are speaking to them from their future. But maybe we can offer more than this assurance. Maybe we can offer specific counsel and guidance, advisories on how to negotiate challenges and opportunities on roads that lie in our past, but in their future. What have we got to lose by trying this?

Adapted from Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.